other way. On reaching home, he would feel ashamed of what had taken place; but the wish to possess hair, always accompanied by great sensual pleasure, became more and more powerful in him. He wondered that previously, even in the most intimate intercourse with women, he had experienced no such feeling. One evening he could not resist the impulse to cut off a girl’s hair. With the hair in his hand, at home, the sensual process was repeated. He was forced to rub his body with the hair and envelop his genitals in it. Finally, quite exhausted, he grew ashamed, and could not trust himself to go out for several days. After months of rest he was again impelled to possess himself of female hair, indifferent as to whose it might be. If he attained his end, he felt himself possessed by a supernatural power and unable to give up his booty. If he could not attain the object of his desire, he became greatly depressed, hurried home, and there reveled in his collection of hair. He combed and fondled it, and thus had intense orgasm, satisfying himself by masturbation. Hair exposed in the cases of hair-dressers made no impression on him; it required hair hanging down from a female head.
At the height of his act, he states, he is in such a state of excitement that he has only imperfect apperception and subsequent memory of what he does. When he touches the hair with the shears he has erection, and, at the instant of cutting it off, ejaculation. Since his misfortune, about three years ago, he states that he has had weakness of memory, is easily exhausted mentally, and has been troubled by sleeplessness and night-terrors. P. deeply regrets his crime.
Not only hair, but a number of hair-pins, ribbons, and other articles of the feminine toilet, were found in his possession, which he had had presented to him. He had always had an actual mania for collecting such things, as well as newspapers, pieces of wood, and other worthless trash, which he would never give up. He also had a strange and, to him, inexplicable fear of passing a certain street; if he ever tried it, it made him ill.
The opinion (medico-legal) showed him to be hereditarily predisposed, and proved the imperative, impulsive, and decidedly involuntary character of the criminal acts, which had the significance of an imperative act, induced by an imperative idea, with an accompaniment of overpowering abnormal sexual feeling. Pardon; asylum for insane. (Voisin, Socquet, Motet, Annales d’hygiène, April, 1890.)Following this case, is a similar one which also deserves attention; for it has been well studied, and may be called almost classical; and, too, it places the fetich, as well as the original associative awakening of the idea, in a clear light:—
